A thorny conundrum has been stuck in the craw of Biblical scholar 5th-level elf mage Darek Isaacs for quite some time now: If dragons are mythical creatures, and the Bible is the literal truth written by God's own big white hand, then why are dragons mentioned in the Bible!?!?!!? It would mean that GOD LIED. IT MAKES NO SENSE. The only logical explanation is that dragons were literally really real creatures and Jesus fought them with a big sword from the back of his trusty stegosaurus Louise. Duh. Bible-science.

(It certainly couldn't be that the Bible was written in the same literary tradition as the rest of the western canon and employs metaphor for the purposes of emotional weight and nuance. You know, like writers do. Seriously, it's disrespectful how little artistic cred Biblical literalists give to their favorite book.)

“If dragons in fact were entirely mythological, if they were a figment of the imagination, and if they never ever did exist, then God just compared our adversary to a make-believe creature that never existed,” he said.

:-|

I think you might be on to something, sir.

Now, I don't personally believe in Satan (or dragons, or demons, or resurrection, or underground pits of eternally burning gay people, or that a guy can build a campfire in a whale's colon), but I don't mind if people do as long as their commitment to literalism remains wholly separate from my country's legislation and scientific progress. I recognize that religious beliefs, institutions, and structured rituals—even ones that seem arbitrary to an outsider—can be extremely fortifying for people, especially communities of people that have been abandoned or demonized by the status quo.

HOWEVER. This dragon shit is not about religious beliefs. It's about science. More specifically, it's about actively throwing science out the window because you want to play lifesize D&D with the entire earth. The idea that you can just choose to ignore centuries of scientific progress because it's fun and it makes you feel good—and then declare yourself correct based on your own hunches—sets about a billion dangerous precedents. Dragons did exist, they were called dinosaurs, and they went extinct about 65 million years before modern humans even showed up. Having faith in the unprovable is one thing; denying the proven is another.